Monthly Archives: July 2014

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In the courtyard outside my back door a silent battle for light has been raging. It can be quite distracting at times!

It all started a couple of days after the first substantial monsoon rain of the season. Hundreds of morning glory seedlings sprang up, angling U-shaped seed-leaves to the light. This was a couple of weeks ago. It was calm out in the courtyard until these seedlings began to send up shoots and jostle for a position which would provide a steady supply of sunlight. Gotta have energy to flower and ripen seeds, after all!

Here’s one of the first shoots trying to reach an overhanging pyracantha branch.

Once the true leaves had appeared it became apparent to me that these were Ivy-leaved Morning Glories (Ipomoea hederacea), a weedy species which may or may not be native to Southeast Arizona. The flowers will be small, about half the size of the blooms of a cultivated variety like Heavenly Blue, but with the same limpid sky-blue coloration.

This next shot was taken about ten days later. You can see some of the deeply-lobed true leaves beginning to form. Since morning glory shoots can’t see as they grope for a purchase upon whatever might enable them to climb, sometimes two or more shoots will encounter each other. In this photo several shoots are intertwined and the result might be that the collective weight will be their undoing. It’s like a slow-motion wrestling match.

This scenario reminds me of the old cautionary tale about crabs struggling to get out of a bucket. Once one crab manages to get part of the way up the steep sides of the bucket, other crabs will cling to it and they all fall back to the bottom.

Perhaps one in fifty of the hundreds of morning glory seedlings in the courtyard will survive to flower and bear seeds. At least they are silent during all of this struggle and strife!

Last night I was out in the mesquite scrub when the thunderstorm blew in. I was a mile from my truck and before long I was drenched, and I couldn’t even see my way. I sensed a massive creature moving towards me, crushing mesquite and acacia trees in its path, and I backed away. A flash of lightning illuminated the creature, which had red-gleaming eyes and fangs dripping loathsome viscous ichor. I screamed as the spawn of hell leaped upon me and ripped my flesh with dagger-like talons…

Oops, sorry, that was just an idle fantasy! This is what really happened:

Last night I was playing music with friends at the Copper Queen Saloon in Bisbee, Arizona. While we played jaunty Irish dance tunes a dramatic thunderstorm moved in. We kept on playing right through a couple of power outages as lightning flashed overhead.

This morning I wondered how much rain had fallen out in the valley where Bev and I have built a cabin. I drove out there early, but walked the last mile so I could determine if the road was passable. The rain gauge at the cabin showed one inch of rain, and the desert scrub looked hydrated and happy.

The road wasn’t too eroded, and on my way back to my truck I decided to cut diagonally across a neighbor’s property. Luckily I had my trusty camera with me, as I encountered two species of plants in full bloom. The first one was intriguing. A low-growing plant, it had fleshy red-tinged stems and flowers which reminded me of those of Catalpa and Desert Willow trees.

The flowers modestly faced the ground, so I plucked one and arranged it on a leaf so as to make its beautifully-speckled mouth visible:

When I got home I determined that this plant was a Devil’s Claw (Proboscidea althaeifolia), a plant which I had never seen growing. I am, though, familiar with the dramatically-sculpted seed pods, which have an uncanny ability to latch on to man or beast. One day in March of 2013 I was laboriously making my way through a thicket of Point-leaved Manzanita and Emory Oak. I was up on a canyon slope on the north edge of Bisbee. When I emerged from the thicket I noticed that a Devil’s Claw seed-pod had found my arm:

When a Devil’s Claw seed-pod ripens it splits down a central suture and the wickedly-incurved spines are then ready for whomever happens by. It’s an ingenious system for transporting seeds to a new locality!

The immature pods are reputed to be good to eat, as are the ripened seeds. Some day I’ll try them!

The second plant I found looked something like a squash or cucumber plant. The leaves were pleated in a fetching way, and the yellow flowers looked to be open for sexual business:

Notice how the leaves are beginning to unfold their pleats now that there is some moisture in the ground:

The plant, which I later identified as Melon Loco (Apodanthera undulata), has simple but effective yellow flowers:

The growing tips of the shoots are appealingly fuzzy:

The little melon-like fruit of this plant is supposed to be very bitter. I suppose the common name “Melon Loco” is supposed to suggest that anyone who would eat one of these fruits is loco!

It is easy to take the Creosote Bush (Larrea tridentata) for granted in the Southwest. In some desert regions they occur in the millions, and thankfully the human race hasn’t yet figured out an economic use for the plants. They don’t even photograph well; their leaves are small and they tend to blend into the landscape.

These shrubs are survivors. The leaves are small and leathery and the plants make good use of what rain might fall. The Spanish name for the plant is Gobernadora, the Governess, which is thought to refer to the shrub’s dominance of the ground they occupy. Few other plants can compete with a Creosote Bush, even others of the same species, and they tend to grow well-spaced from each other, in aromatic orchard-like arrays.

Another Spanish name for the shrub is Hediondilla, which could be roughly translated as “Little Stinker”. Whoever came up with this uncomplimentary name must have been new to the desert! The odor of the leaves is an acquired taste, I admit. Some adjectives which come to mind are: astringent, resinous, medicinal, and sharp — but I’m sure you have noticed that the English language is notoriously ill-equipped for describing odors! Whenever I encounter Larrea I enjoy picking a few leaves, crushing them, and inhaling the scent.

After a rain the Creosote Bushes gratefully open their stomata and their odor wafts onto the breezes. This scent mixes with the odors released from the pollen grains and other organic detritus in the soil, and the commingled smells contribute to the sense of well-being desert residents enjoy after a rain-shower.

On our property in the Sulphur Springs Valley there is just an acre or so of Creosote Bush. On a recent visit I noticed that the bushes were beginning their blooming period. The yellow blossoms are pretty and distinctive, but they are difficult to photograph in situ, as the limber branches bob and wave in the slightest breeze. I snipped off a flowering branch and took it back to Bisbee with me. The branch has continued to open new flowers here on a windowsill (in a cup with some water) and I shot a few photos.

This morning, as the sun peeped above the canyon wall, I got up — got out of bed — dragged a comb across my head… but actually I didn’t bother to do the latter. I had a visitor, and before I’d even made coffee! I couldn’t harbor ill feelings, as the visitor was a rare female moth, who seemed to be exhausted after laying her eggs.

This moth was clinging to the outside of my screen door. The moth’s wings were intricately patterned, with what looked like an infinity symbol, a “lazy 8”, displayed on each fore-wing:

I gently touched the creature and it flew away:

The moth circled back and landed on my outstretched right-hand index finger. I had my camera nearby, but how to snap a photo when my subject was on the finger which does this? I managed to contort my left hand so that I could reach the shutter button, but it was damned awkward.

I needed a nicely-contrasting backdrop for a more formal photo. I noticed a nearby book, a hardback edition of the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. The dust jacket was black — just the thing! I offered the book to the confused moth and it scampered onto the front cover, then crawled onto the side of the book. It seemed to prefer the slight roughness of the layered pages to the glossy dust-jacket. That was okay — after all, she was a guest!

Hours later, the moth is still on that book:

I talked on the phone with a local moth guru and learned that this species is more common in Mexico, and that Bisbee is near the northern limit of its range. The expert with whom I talked has been collecting and hand-rearing moths here in Southeast Arizona for many years. He said:

“Over a period of thirty years I’ve collected this species just one time, and that one was a male. I never had the opportunity to rear one.”

He asked me if the abdomen of my female moth was plump or skinny. I replied that it definitely wasn’t plump!

“Well, she’s probably already laid her eggs, and she’s ready to die.”

Just for the record, the moth is a Noctuid and rejoices in the Latin name Lichnoptera decora.

I felt privileged to witness the last hours of a mother from the South!

Yesterday morning, before the sun became too intense, I walked along a trail which runs along the north canyon slope overlooking Bisbee. This was a favorite haunt of mine during the summer of 2012, when I was living in a house just below that trail.

One of my goals yesterday was to see how the Pink-throated Morning Glories (Ipomoea longifolia) were doing after the recent rains. This species of morning glory is a true Chihuahuan desert plant. In Arizona it can only be seen in two southeast counties, yet another Mexican plant which has found its northern limit here in Cochise County.

Morning glories tend to have heart-shaped leaves and a propensity for climbing. This species has narrow strap-like leaves and it won’t climb more than a foot or two, even when opportunities present themselves. The plant doesn’t reveal that it is indeed related to Heavenly Blue and other Ipomoea species and cultivars until it flowers.

This photo shows one of this morning glory’s vines making its way across the crumbling Pinal Schist. Look carefully at the right-hand side of the image and you can see one of the buildings of Old Bisbee several hundred feet below.

Here is the morning sun highlighting another traveling shoot:

I’ll be in Nova Scotia by the time this plant flowers. Ah, well, I’d love to see the fresh blossoms again, but you can’t always get what you want, right? Here’s a photo I shot during the 2012 monsoon season, soon after I first encountered this bewitching species:

Yesterday evening I was sitting out on the porch, enjoying the cool breezes and reading a novel. I looked up from the book, contemplating a particularly felicitous passage, and a glint of gold caught my eye. Something shiny was catching a stray sun-ray, some random bit of organic debris on the concrete porch floor. I put the book down, got up, and squatted by the glinting object. It was a dead scarab beetle of some sort. Its back was brilliantly striped with green and gold. The insect corpse looked like a piece of enamel-work, as if it had come from Fabergé’s workshop.

This morning I placed the dead creature on a slab of limestone out in the courtyard. I photographed it from various angles. I stood there looking at the beetle and wondered what to do with it. It seemed a shame to toss such a brilliant and finely-wrought relic of a beetle’s life into the weeds. I finally decided that the best thing to do was to give it to a sharp-eyed six-year-old boy, the son of a friend. That kid collects such things.

I identified the beetle, using the Kaufman insect field guide and the very useful web-site BugGuide . I’m reasonably certain that my beetle is Chrysina gloriosa, the Glorious Scarab Beetle. I posted the photo below to Facebook, but I thought there might be more to say about the photos I took than would be appropriate for such an ephemeral and commercial venue. I use Facebook daily, since many of my friends and family members do the same, but I don’t trust the site. I think that Facebook encourages short attention spans, and I like to keep my current span long!

This evening I took a second look at my scarab photos. An aside: we tend to take for granted each new power technology grants us. Sometimes a sense of appreciative wonder is appropriate. The images produced by even cheap digital cameras these days are of such high resolution that cropping a small area and enlarging it can reveal marvelous hidden details. I was doing this with my scarab images, cropping, zooming, and wandering around a near-microscopic landscape. My attention was drawn to one of the creature’s front feet. What an intriguingly odd appendage! It looked like something from the Jurassic era, perhaps a flipper on a plesiosaur swimming in ancient seas… or perhaps a limb from one of the horrific creatures which populated H.P. Lovecraft’s fever-dreams:

The rudimentary ridges on that foot — could they be the ancestral forms of our own fingers? And look at the scarab’s eye in that shot. Doesn’t it look like it’s glancing right at you? This is an unsettling illusion I first noticed when photographing moths years ago. I eventually realized that what looks like a pupil in the insect’s compound eyes is actually a reflection of the camera’s lens.

In this next zoomed view I was surprised to see a wickedly-armed hind foot on the beetle, which is a herbivore quietly subsisting on Alligator Juniper fronds. The foot looks like it bears a raptor’s talon, or the gripping claws of a Tyrannosaurus. The purpose of these appendages is probably just for holding on tight to branches while feeding, or for gripping a mate tightly while engaged in copulation.

Since this particular scarab beetle was dead when I found it, it most likely had accomplished the humble tasks for which it had evolved. It left behind, though, an iridescent chitinous carcass which served to spark my imagination!

A couple of years ago I was wandering along the south-facing canyon slopes up above Bisbee, Arizona. I was near the crest in an area which had suffered a wind-driven burn a few years ago. The fierce blaze had killed off the Emory Oaks and all other trees. Blackened skeletal trunks were gradually being shaded and replaced by new sprouts, but at that time the area was dominated by grass, yucca, and agave. Regeneration after a hot fire takes decades.

It was pure serendipity, a gift from the gods, which allowed me to stumble upon a lone pancake-like cactus, a species of Mammillaria which I knew had been reported as growing in the Bisbee area, but which I had never seen before. Sometimes known as Cream Cactus due to it’s milky sap, this particular specimen was about nine inches in diameter but only an inch or so high; it was nearly invisible, surrounded as it was by clumps of the indigenous grasses Blue Grama and Sideoats Grama.

That was the only Cream Cactus I’ve ever seen after many miles of tramping around — until last week. I was taking photos in a miniscule park on Bisbee’s south side, a rough area paved with limestone fragments and supporting a thick growth of ocotillos and agaves. I was trying to avoid ocotillo thorns while positioning myself for a photo when I happened to look down and saw my second Cream Cactus right between my feet! This photo shows the faded remnants of this year’s flowers atop the nippled cactus, and I suspect the orange-brown ovoid in the lower-right corner of the scene might be a fallen fruit. Like many cacti, Mammillaria heyderii completes its reproductive duties before the monsoon rains arrive. I have yet to see one in bloom.

Looking about on the web for possible human uses of this cactus I came across a quote from an ethnobotanical study:

“Mammillaria heyderi is a little discussed species, which is reported to be used by the Tarahumaras. We first encountered this species in the Tarahumara-English dictionary compiled by the Swedish explorer Ivar Thord-Gray. Discussing sorcery and black magic among the Tarahumaras, Thord-Gray reports, that ‘only the shaman is umeru-ame (powerful) enough to locate wizards and witches. To do this he will make medicine from ball-cactus wichu-ri-ki, which is greatly feared for its magical powers. This medicine will clear his vision. It matters not how well the suku-ru-ame (wizard, witch) is hidden, the shaman can see him clearly’ …Not only is this cactus useful for locating wizards and supplying food, but it is also used as a medicine to cure or relieve headaches. ‘After the spines are removed, the plant is cut up into two or more pieces, roasted for a few minutes, and then part of the stuff is pushed into the ear.’ …(This) is corroborated by Bennett & Zingg, who describe the same manner of roasting the cactus before ‘the soft center in pushed into the ear in the case of ear-ache or deafness.’ Thord-Gray also reports that wichu-ri-ki is an important medicine that will prolong life, ‘make the foot light and increase the speed of a runner in a race.’ The Tarahumara name for the cacti listed by Bennett & Zingg is witculiki. Witculiki and wichu-ri-ki are possibly related to wichuwa-ka, which means ‘crazy, demented, mad, insane, etc.” (Bruhn and Bruhn, 1973)

Known in Spanish as “biznaga de chilillos,” with the edible red fruits called “chilitos.” This species, and other latex-containing Mammillarias are often sold in the drug stalls of Mexico and are used as popular folk remedies. M. applanata, M. hemisphaerica and M. Meiacantha are generally believed to be M. heyderi. 2/P, 10/P
N,-methyl-3,4-dimethoxyphenethylamine

So the cactus was thought to prolong life, help you to run faster, and even cure an earache! No wonder there aren’t many left!

During the oppressively dry summer weeks before the monsoon rains began to fall I was living out in the Sulphur Springs Valley. Looking north I could see mountains eighty miles away, and to the south, a bit closer, were mountains in Mexico. East and west, just a few miles away are the Swisshelm and Mule mountains. Over the past millions of years these mountains had shed alluvium which filled the valley a mile deep in sand and gravel. A vast sky — at any given time something meteorological was happening somewhere on the horizon, especially as evening shadows lengthened.

A fact of life out in the valley is that the rim mountains get twice as much rain as the valley does. It’s not fair, but since when has life been fair? The result is that during the dry weeks and months valley folks see more rain in the distance, over the mountains, than they directly experience.

One impressive sight, if a bit tantalizing, is a virga, a horse-tail-like plume of rain which evaporates in the dry atmosphere before it hits the ground. Here’s one I saw in May:

Here’s another impressive May sky scene, a band of rain falling over the Mule Mountains a few miles to the west. This was a rain that Bisbee was getting, while the valley saw nary a drop. Beautiful sight, though!

Cloudy tumult:

There should be a word or phrase for the dry pre-monsoon weeks. Perhaps we could borrow a term from the early Christians. Antediluvian means “before the flood”; the Latinate word was coined to describe the era before Noah’s flood. How about antepluvial, a word I cobbled together from Latin words for “before” and “rains”. The word monsoon is a Southeast Asian word which was (according to legend) brought back by Air Force pilots returning from the Viet Nam conflict.

Another portentously beautiful cloud scene which yielded no rain:

That central cloud mass intrigued me; it looked like a castle or spacecraft hovering above.

One cool morning in late April I was out wandering in the dry washes. The omnipresent mesquites were blooming and fungus-farming ants were busy snipping off mesquite flowers and leaves and conveying them to vast underground ant empires, where worker ants were chewing up the vegetative material for fungus compost.

On the bank of a wash not far from our cabin a tangled mass of greenery caught my eye. The vining plant bore flowers structurally reminding me of milkweed flowers. I eventually determined that the plant belonged to a genus related to Asclepias, the milkweed genus. The plant is called Twining Milkweed, or Fringed Twinevine, and its Latin name is Funastrum cyanthoides. The plant was growing lushly with no apparent source of water. The species must have a deep water-storing taproot!

I’ve walked for miles along washes in the valley, and that one patch of Twinevine was the only one I ever encountered!

Last night I was about to turn in. I was outside, sitting in a lawn chair and reading a Kate Atkinson novel under a yellow bug-light.

A medium sized moth wandered by and it intrigued me with its coloration. I grabbed a handy cottage cheese container, captured the insect, and went to bed.

Today I gingerly peered into the container. The moth was sulking in a corner and wouldn’t make eye contact with me. I tipped the moth out of the container and went inside to fetch my camera.

By the time I got back the moth had revived and spread its wings. Such patterns on its wings! I snapped this photo as the moth valiantly tried to ignore me:

As I watched this moth try to figure out what was going on I heard a still small voice in my head:

“More human meddling! My ancestors came to this canyon from Mexico soon after the last uplift, back when you busy primates were winkling grubs from hollow logs, mating indiscriminately, even with other primate species, and eating each other when such opportunities arose. We’ll still be here when when your species has squandered the opportunities you have been given and begin to suffer an extinction which all arthropods are patiently awaiting. Oh, I should except the bedbugs and cockroaches, they will miss you! And the blackflies of the North will be desolate.”

I thought “Well, this might be true, but I have some short-term motivations. I’d like one more photo; perhaps a frontal view which shows those distinctive red leg-ruffs?”

“Well, I can’t stop you, but do you have to put photos of me on Facebook? My peers will make fun of me, I’m afraid!”

After a rather difficult period living out in the Sulphur Springs Valley during a remarkably hot and dry early summer, I succumbed to a desire for a bit of civilized life. Hell, I’m sixty years old. I don’t have the stamina for such primitive conditions that I once had!

I rented an apartment in Bisbee, a canyon town one thousand feet higher in elevation, and I’m now indulging myself in such luxuries as plumbing, a kitchen, and wifi net access.

The house I’m staying in is nestled in a notch blasted from the steep canyon slope. High retaining walls surround the house and courtyard. A dozen or so steps lead down to the street, a loop up the slope from the main drag, Tombstone Canyon Road.

One morning last week I walked down the steps to the street. I encountered a man in his mid-sixties who was patching some bad spots in the asphalt. It turned out that he owns the house across the street and had become frustrated by the City of Bisbee’s lack of attention to the pitted street surface. He and some other residents are pooling their resources and fixing the street themselves. Many of these home-owners, including the man I was talking with, would like to sell their houses — but the market is bad right now.

Taking a break from his work, the man told me a tale of woe, a personal drama of a type not uncommon in this border region. It seems that seven years ago this man was 56 years old and had never been married. He was on a vacation in the town of Animas, a small resort town nestled at the base of the Sierra Madre, in the southern part of the Mexican state of Sonora. A Mexican waitress served him food in a restaurant and, mirabile dictu, he fell in love with her. The waitress had recently been abandoned by her husband and she had small children to raise. A factor which this newly-wed man didn’t consider all that important, but which would cause problems later, is that his new wife was twelve years younger than him.

Now the man and his family have a house in Animas, but after years of effort they have been unable to acquire residency, neither for her in the US nor him in Mexico. This guy has reduced his goals after so much frustration with government agencies, who collectively seem to be convinced that the marriage is a scam, a nefarious way to gain a green card for his wife. After seven years all that the man wants is for his Social Security check go to his family after he dies. Even that seems nearly impossible — the estimates the man has heard are daunting; it could cost upwards of seventy thousand bucks to achieve that goal, which seems to be reserved for the wealthy.

I sympathized with this man, but realized that there wasn’t much I could say. I’m no fan of the INS and the Border Patrol. This part of Arizona is crawling with green-and-white SUVs, a result of massive paranoia-induced funding in the years since 9/11. We have internal checkpoints here — did you know that? I can’t drive to Tucson without having to stop and be screened by the armed Border Patrol officers at one checkpoint or another. Instead of Checkpoint Charlie we have Checkpoint Carlos, so to speak.

After hearing this man’s tale I headed up the steps to my apartment, feeling a bit down. I was ready for some contact with non-human creatures which lead uncomplicated lives, or at least lives which are more patterned and predictable.

Lately I’ve been seeing a distinctive large bug, a true bug in the order Hemiptera, which has scarlet-tipped antennae and feet. I’d tried to photograph this species, but they kept trotting away and wouldn’t pause long enough to get a good focused shot. That morning, after my long conversation with the neighbor related above, I encountered yet another example of that large bug species. It was walking purposefully across the graveled courtyard. I found a plastic cottage cheese container in the kitchen and before the bug knew what was happening I had captured the hapless creature in the container and put it in the fridge in order to slow it down for a while.

Since I first encountered this bug I had determined its species; I’m reasonably sure that these bugs are Giant Agave Bugs (Acanthocephala thomasi), herbivores which feed upon agave and other desert plants. After a few minutes I took the container from the fridge and shook the chilled bug out onto the brick paving in the courtyard. It seemed confused and couldn’t control its legs very well, possibly thinking about the Cold Dark Place to which I had condemned it for a time.

Even partial sun here in Arizona is quite powerful. Dappled light under a mulberry tree was more than enough to get bug blood flowing!

This bug belongs to a group called the Leaf-footed Bugs. I assume the leafy vanes on the hind legs are a form of camouflage, but I wonder what the saw-tooth spikes are for? Maybe stridulation? A secure grip while mating?

The bug seemed to be regaining consciousness and I could see it surveying the scene. It’s not surprising that the bug was heading away from me, the monstrous creature that had imprisoned it in the Cold Dark Place. The bug spread its wings and wing-covers and flew up onto a green plastic watering can.

“Green! It must be an agave!”

No such luck, but the corrugated handle of the watering can made a nice backdrop for a photo;

The Giant Agave Bug flew away, possibly sensing a pheromone trail, but there is a postscript to this tale. This morning I was sitting out on the porch when I saw something small walking directly towards me across a graveled area in the courtyard. I first noticed this creature when it was about ten feet away; as it approached I realized that it was another Giant Agave Bug. Curious, I watched as it approached the concrete slab porch floor, which was elevated above the gravel a few inches. A fanciful thought occurred to me: what if this was the same bug I had photographed a few days earlier?

The bug climbed the vertical edge of the concrete porch floor and headed for my bare foot. Perhaps it was thinking:

“I hope that this enormous god-like being will put me back in the Cold Dark Place for a while. It’s just so hot out in the sun today!”

The bug climbed up onto my big toe and advanced across my instep. It certainly seemed determined! It found the cuff of my jeans and began to ascend my shin. It clambered up over the knob of my knee, then kept walking up my thigh. When it approached my crotch I had had enough. I gave it a light flick of my finger and it flew away. The idea of that bug crawling into my ear canal or nostril had occurred to me.

A day after I refrigerated the Giant Agave Bug I was once again sitting out on the porch. A fairly large Chinese Privet tree shades that side of the courtyard. Some motion on the tree’s trunk caught my eye. Some strange-looking gray insect was slowly climbing the tree. I looked closer; it was a large sphinx moth, but the wings looked shrunken and deformed:

I went back into the house and ate some lunch: leftover Basmati rice with tempeh. My curiosity was aroused, though — what was going on with that weird and monstrous moth. Half an hour had passed by the time I once again regarded my mothy visitor. The wings were bigger… it dawned on me that I was witnessing a biological transformation I’d read about but never witnessed. The moth had just emerged from an underground pupa, and its wings were being pumped full of a fluid which would gradually harden and enable flight.

I gently encouraged the insect to crawl onto my hand. I imagine it was distracted by its morphological changes, and begrudgingly acquiesced to my silent entreaty; perhaps it had heard of the Cold Dark Place and thought it would comply in order to avoid such exile.

Another few minutes passed after I let the moth crawl back onto the tree trunk. I left it alone for a while, thinking that if I had fluid stiffening in my veins I might not want company. I do have a modicum of empathy with my insect friends!

The next time I checked the moth was gone, most likely soaring along the canyon slopes in search of a mate.